I’m back! My kids are (finally) at the age where they can sort of entertain themselves, COVID has given me more time at home than I know what to do with, and our TT league had to find a new home. All of which meant: it was time to come back to FUMBBL! And it seems that in the three years since I last played here some amazing things have been happening (combined tournaments, the FUMBBL podcast!!, new features, MORE SECRET LEAGUE TEAMS, the list goes on). But one thing stood out even amongst all of that: the Box Trophy. As soon as I saw that it existed I knew I had to do a run, even though my coaching muscles haven't been flexed much lately. Here’s how that went!

Crash Team Racing

Final record: 12/5/8 I learned a LOT about coaching Slann by taking this team through 25 games. The last time I played Slann was before the Piling On changes, and at that time I preferred to build around a squad of blitzers, with possibly one catcher as support, and focused on player removal in addition to ball-sniping. I went with a different build this time, with one blitzer as guard and multiple catchers to support him and harass the ball carrier. The normal focus on skilling the whole team worked well at first, but we had trouble keeping our linefrogs alive and by the end of the run most of the skills were bunched on the catchers, blitzer, and krox, and a lot of those were survival skills. I felt like my team, with as many positionals as I was running, really need to be dishing out at least a little damage, and we had to rely on our krox for that, which is never a sure bet. In retrospect I might have built a second blitzer up to be the hunter-killer to go along with the guard (or possibly instead of the guard, but guard is SO precious on Slann) but by the time I was 20 games along in my run and realized this lack it was far too late to put that plan into motion. We also had an issue keeping tacklers alive, which led to our final game, a truly epic beatdown by Monolith38’s dark elves, who were rocking mass blodge (however, we did force the elves to make an impressive self-dump-off that ended up on Reddit). We might have also found more success if we had kept our TV trimmer, but Slann are so expensive that it would have been tricky to figure out where to cut on the team as I envisioned it. I was browsing through the forums and saw an intriguing build idea of an all-linemen team with one catcher – maybe that’s the one I’ve been looking for. Guess we’ll have to try it next season!

Sonic Life

Final record: 10/10/5 The idea behind my human build was to mimic my successful Sonik Deth blackbox team from back in the day. The tenets then were simple: keep TV lean, forgo the ogre, and hit hard. The team scrapped pretty well, but without PO we couldn’t dish out the damage quite like we did three years ago, and without the ogre we found we fell behind in strength. However, once we dedicated ourselves to staying around 1400 TV things started to come together a bit more. Still, for a race that I’ve played more than 200 games with in the Box, my humans didn’t quite perform as well as I’d hoped, though a decent amount of that is no doubt due to my rusty coaching.

Major Prophets

Final record: 15/7/3 I have loved playing High Elves for a long time (it’s also my only painted team so I play them IRL pretty often too) so it was a no-brainer to take them for the trophy. Our run started out strong but hit a bumpy spot about a third of the way in. It was during a tough match, and our first loss, against Chivite, that really put a spotlight to what our team lacked: guards (or, I suppose, stat increases!). In that match we resorted to 1 die blocks just to break through his line and, understandably, it was a terrible plan that ended poorly. Luckily the team took the lesson to heart and the thrower promptly rolled some guard, with both catchers soon following suit. With 3 guards taking the field we were much better able to break through defenses and harass strength teams. Incidentally, all three of our losses were against orcs *shakes fist at the sky*.

Keg Krashers

Final record: 15/5/5 I have almost no Norse experience, so bringing them along on the Trophy run was a pleasant surprise. Without thinking about my starting build much, I initially brought both berserkers and both ulfs, which worked out okay until I just needed to make a simple block. Sometimes you don’t want all of your hitters to frenzy, it turns out! So I decided to not replace the berserkers as they were inevitably destroyed, 7 AV and all, and went with two ulfs and the runner (in fact, I only kept one ulf when I still had a berserker alive, then added the second ulf back in when he died). If I would have thought about it earlier in the run I would have brought a thrower for that Leader access, but the team stayed lean just by losing players left and right. Our runner, though, managed to get well on his way to legend by the end of our 25 games, and was forced to be a one-man team at times. In retrospect, I probably would go with both ulfs as guards, two runners, a leader-caddy thrower, and maybe one berserker to be the hitter. The team hovered around 1400, which was a good level for them, I think, and they were our second highest-scoring team of the run, so go Norse! 4 stars, would play again.

Of course, since the first run was so fun, my opponents in the Box so varied and great to chat with, we just HAD to put together a second run. Hopefully we'll be able to rise to even greater heights with our Chaos Chosen, Halflings, Dark Elves, and Pro Elves!

Oh, and almost forgot: thanks to jdmickleburgh for showing me the bbcode to make my post look not-terrible!